Extra MIC buildings and cheap units?

Hi
I'm new to the EB mod and have only played a couple factions thus far. I have a couple questions and couldn't find them in the FAQs.

1. What are the secondary military buildings for (I think they say foreign troops and levies, or something similar)? Every time I build them, they never produce any troops. Do these buildings do anything? If so, what? Why are they available to build if they don't produce troops?

2. Are there any inexpensive levy-style troops for hire, such as Vanilla's peasants? For EB, I raise units of the cheapest troops available to keep in my cities (archers or slingers, usually), but even these units get expensive when you have 25+ cities stocked with a few units of archers each. Am I missing something? Do other players have to do this as well?

Thanks,

B

You have two different types of MIC, one for factional troops and one for local troops. The level you can build each to depends on your govt level, with a level 1 govt you can build the top level of factional MIC and with level 4 you can build the highest local MIC. Use the recruitment viewer to see what troops you can get in each region to decide which is best to build.
Most players do use archers or slingers as garrison troops.

Hello chaosklima!

1. The secondary (regional) barracks are used for recruiting regional units that
are available in that province. You should look in the recruitment viewer that
you can download at the EB site. It would help If you posted what faction
you are playing with and the provinces in which you cant recruit units

2. I think archers and slingers are the cheapest units available. Units in EB are
more expensive than Vanilla ones (thats actually a good thing in gameplay
terms).

levy skirmishers are the best garrison troops imho, more men than archers/slinger and similar cost

It really depends on the location and relative safety of your city. In the heart of your empire, a number of turns from your closest front, you prefer the unit that is cheapest / man (biggest Public Order bonus against lowest cost).

For cities on the front archers, slingers and basic spearmen or the like are to be preferred. They can do basic combat. Whether to use archers or slingers also depends a bit on what you might be facing - if you will be facing tons of highly armored opponents, slingers may have the cutting edge.

This would allow for these units to manoeuver if there is a need for additional support, or when having to take care of Eleutheroi which are blocking strategically important point for your defense / offense.

"Local troops" are troops that are similar enough for your faction to use them (Romans using state of the art Horse Archers are not going to happen), but not part of your factional unit roster.

Many thanks to all for the replies.

Another question regarding the regional barracks: are regional troops not available until a certain level of barracks has been built? E.g., just because I have built the first two levels of regional barracks, doesn't necessarily mean that regional troops are actually available, right? Maybe I need to build the barracks to the 3rd, 4th, or 5th level before regional troops become available?

I stop building the regional barracks after one or two levels b/c I never see any troops being added to the unit roster and it seems like a waste of funds to go any further for no benefit.

Like Maximus Aurelius said, download the EB recruitment viewer. This lets you see which units can be recruited and which MIC is required.

Sounds like you might be playing the Romani! Yes, this confused me too, at first. My advice? Get the recruitment viewer, but also examine the various reforms. For example, in order to recruit homeland troops in ALL of the homeland, the Romani must get the first set of reforms.

IIRC, you get the largest variety of regional troops in an enemy's homeland.